Actually many governments are concerned about it. But only the US (so far) had pulled the nuclear option.

I feel like they're threatening a shutdown in the hopes of getting them to reverse their decision because if they just quietly go along with it, other countries will likely quickly follow suit in short order.

The reality is that the lifespan of "most popular social media app" is incredibly short. In the space of a few short years, we've gone from MySpace to Facebook to twitter to vine to Snapchat and now to tiktok.

TikTok will soon enough be replaced by "the next cool thing" and BD knows that if they sell in the US, that new entity will quickly replace them globally because the US effectively IS the influencer market.

Viewers go where the content is, and that's still overwhelmingly American (for better or worse). There is no successful social media app without including the US and BD knows it.